Home And Away star Emily Symons once said she’d “given up hope” of having children following years of unsuccessful IVF attempts.
WATCH BELOW: Emily Symons on her career
But in 2015, the then-46-year-old’s dream of being a mum finally came true when she welcomed her son Henry Richard Francis Jackson with her then partner Paul Jackson.
“I very much thought it couldn’t happen and I was too old,” Emily said.
“I thought it would be impossible but it isn’t. I’d given up, really, I thought I had tried every avenue that was available to us. My advice is to not give up if you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed by the whole process.”
Adding of her heartache to try and conceive: “I spent a lot of my 30s being so anguished about not having a baby.”
“But the flip side is that IVF can take over your life. It gets to the point where you’re so desperate to have a baby, everything else falls by the wayside.”
Emily, who has played Marilyn on the soap on and off for 20 years since 1989, feared Henry would be delivered prematurely due to an issue with her placenta and blood pressure.
However, after being put on virtual bed-rest for the last few weeks of her pregnancy, Henry was delivered by caesarean at 38 weeks.
“I knew when I first visited the obstetrician that I would have a caesarean because of my age,” Emily told Mother & Baby in 2017. “I didn’t mind because it’s taken me all these years to have a baby [and] as long as he was healthy, I didn’t mind how he came out.”
Having lost her own mother several years earlier, Emily credits Henry for helping in the grieving process.
“Watching Henry enjoy little things like going to the supermarket in the car has made me realise that it’s these things that matter. I lost my mother in 2010 and I forgot how to be a happy person,” she says.
“Henry has bought so much joy with him and he’s really taught me how to enjoy my life again.”
Henry celebrated his sixth birthday in lockdown earlier this week, with his proud mother taking to Instagram to share a sweet tribute.
“Happy 6th birthday my beautiful boy,” Emily began in the caption of the post.
“A lockdown birthday that was made so special by his school teachers, little friends, Mums sending videos, FaceTime chats with cousins and beautiful family and even happy birthday sung to him by Aunty Lally and family from the front garden!”
When Henry started preschool in 2019, Emily admitted she “sobbed like a baby” at the drop-off gates.
“He just went off and went, ‘Bye, Mummy – stop taking photos of me,'” she said at the time.
“And off he went without a backward glance. He’s loving it.”
Henry has also visited his mum on the Home And Away set from time to time, and has been snapped in photos with Ray Meagher, who has played Alf since the late ’80s.
“He’s really interested in microphones and headphones and he loved all the technical side of it. He thought it was so much fun, leaping around in his Spider-Man outfit,” Emily said in 2019.
But even though Henry has visited the set – and loves seeing magazine articles about his mum – Emily thinks he doesn’t quite understand what her job is.
“He thinks it’s normal that there’s a picture of Mummy in the magazine. He’s too young to watch Home and Away. I tell him that I work in television, but I don’t think he really understands what that means. He’s only four,” she said at the time.
